The term “spam” is a coined word for unwanted messages especially in digital communications such as e-mails. To detect spam, conventional Bayesian-type e-mail detection systems compare new e-mail messages with language models. The language models are developed by evaluating the text of e-mail messages that are known to be spam and extracting language patterns from the spam messages. The systems then estimate the probably that new e-mail messages are spam based on the frequency with which language patterns from the language models appear in the new e-mail message. Such a system is described, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,161,130.
Such unwanted “spam,” however, may also occur in audio messages such as, for example, voicemail.